Re: Platform independent graphical display for Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2021 14:19:53 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> >> 1: What is "platform-native" varies with each new major release of GTK
> >>    and Windows.
> >
> > But it changes for all the GUI applications, not just for Emacs.
> 
> Which means that they value consistency with other applications that
> follow the platform standard.
> 
> However, Emacs is already largely deviant from the platform's UI. On
> MS-Windows, things like customize-variable shows an interface which has
> nothing to do with the platform's standard GUI widgets.

Isn't that so on other platforms as well?  Wherever Emacs invented its
own UI, that UI and its widgets will always be different from the
platform standards.

> It seems that the only elements which are "native" in the MS-Windows
> port are the menu and the dialogs.

And the scroll bars.  And the frame decorations.

Is that different from other toolkits?  OK, so with GTK we also use
their tool bar and tooltips (and get to live with their limitations),
but other than that?

> If we add to that that Emacs has its own way of doing things (M-x
> command system, interaction through the minibuffer instead of dialogs,
> different keyboard shorcuts for standard actions like cut&paste, etc.)
> we could conclude that Emacs already is very alien to
> MS-Windows/GTK/MacOS UI standards.

That's an exaggeration.

> So I can hardly imagine a typical Emacs user that could make a big issue
> about the menus or dialogs being a bit different from what his
> platform's standard ones are, as long as the replacement is not ugly
> ("ugly" in the sense the motif menu is ugly compared to Lucid and GTK.)

That's an "ad absurdum" kind of argument.

In general, Emacs does do some (quite a few) thing differently, and
where it does, it does so uniformly on all platforms, more or less (I
think NS is the largest outlier here, with its Cmd key).  But this is
a tangent: we weren't discussing the entire UI and its conventions, we
only discussed the GUI aspects of the Emacs appearance.